David Wheat

David Wheat (Ph.D. Vanderbilt 2009) is associate professor in the department of history at Michigan State University. His research addresses migration, slavery, cross-cultural exchange, trans-imperial trade, and maritime societies in the early Iberian Atlantic. His book Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 was published by UNC Press in 2016, on behalf of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. He is also the author or co-author of articles published in The American Historical Review, The Journal of African History, Slavery & Abolition, The Journal of Early Modern History, and in several edited volumes. His work has been supported by the Fulbright Program, the Conference on Latin American History, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. He is currently working, with Marc Eagle, on a history of the transatlantic slave trade from the early 1500s to the mid-1600s. He is also co-editing two essay collections: one, with Ida Altman, on the sixteenth-century Caribbean; the other, with Alex Borucki and David Eltis, on the slave trade to and within colonial Spanish America.

Recent Publications

Atlantic Africa and the Spanish Caribbean, 1570-1640 (Chapel Hill: Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History & Culture by University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

“Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America,” with co-authors Alex Borucki and David Eltis. The American Historical Review 120:2 (Apr 2015): 433-461.

“Global Transit Points and Travel in the Iberian Maritime World, 1580-1640.” In Governing the Sea in the Early Modern Era: Essays in Honor of Robert C. Ritchie, eds. Peter C. Mancall and Carole Shammas, 253-274. San Marino: Huntington Library, 2015.